Cooking of food in residential buildings and homes is a major cause of fires and smoke damage. Of course fires cause significant numbers of preventable deaths, personal injuries as well as property damage. Any means of preventing kitchen fires will be perceived as an important safety advance by individuals, fire departments, insurance companies, health professionals and government agencies.
Restaurant kitchens and large scale food preparation operations are protected by training professional kitchen staff in accident and fire prevention as well as with smoke detectors, fire suppression systems and fire extinguishers.
Homes, student residences, retirement residences and the like where individuals prepare food alone or in an unsupervised non-professional environment are often the scene of kitchen fires due to lack of proper attention, oil spills, grease build-up, carelessness, forgetfulness, and lack of awareness of safe cooking procedures. For example, fire statistics indicate that in North America the cause of over 40% of residential fires is related to cooking.
Electric stoves and heating elements in particular cause kitchen fires because the temperature of the hot surface exceeds the flash point or ignition temperature of many foods, paper, cloth and building materials that may come into contact with the hot surface. U.S. Pat. No. 6,246,033 to Shah provides a temperature controlled electric heating element. However, due to the complexity of the internal stove circuit modifications required, installation must be carried out by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or by a licensed electrician.
Although electric stoves are being produced with a single glass cook top having multiple burners in a single unit, the electric stoves with individual elements are still popular due to lower cost and ease of maintenance. For example, in a rental apartment, damage to a single burner is relatively cheap and easy to repair by simply exchanging the faulty element with a new element. However replacing the entire multiple burner glass cook top is almost as expensive as purchasing a new stove. The fragile nature of glass ceramic cook tops makes such stoves unsuitable for many rental or public housing residences where care and attention to appliances is often lacking, low cost and durability is a major concern.
Accordingly it is desirable to provide a temperature controlled or limiting electric heating element that reduces fire risk and is simple to install by unskilled labour, inexpensive to manufacture, durable and can be retrofit to existing appliances.
Features that distinguish the present invention from the background art will be apparent from review of the disclosure, drawings and description of the invention presented below.